As a literary device, the Mary Sue character is a female of overexaggerated bravery, wit and compete
As a literary device, the Mary Sue character is a female of overexaggerated bravery, wit and competence—in this case aikido skills and an ‘unnatural’ mind—but is a flat creation who, with her lack of character arcs or fatal flaws, plays the males of the story (here, Frank, Joe, Tagomi, Smith) against each other. At first glimpse, Juliana is introduced as a Mary Sue character, out-aikidoing everyone at the dojo, speaking better Japanese than anyone around her, and showing an exaggerated sensitivity to the various levels of San Francisco she navigates. However, Juliana Crain is anything but a one-dimensional stock character. She is, thankfully, no superhero, and she subverts her assets in believably flawed ways, using aikido as a panic-reflex that gets a man killed, and harboring an over-analytic mind that nevertheless has a Joe Blake-sized blind spot. All this disguises a true hero, on a hero’s quest. She is humble, belittled and underestimated, and not properly shod for hiking, but she is persistent. 'Haven’t you had enough?’ Joe asks her, but of course she hasn’t. She is a Campbellian knight of monomyth, searching for the truth, the Man in the High Castle, the Lackawanna portal of suburban boredom. ‘You ever think how different life could be if you could change just one thing?’ she says. She questions reality, hallucinates, talks to spirits, and kills the man she loves the most. Her wound is her sister, her fatal flaw is Joe. She lives on cigarettes, tepid bourbon, and the fire inside. She would give her life to fix the world. The holy grails and Hitchcockian MacGuffins of her quest—the 8mm films—are truths too powerful to handle, truths worth dying for. When Juliana switches film canisters, the film becomes Popeye’s magic can of spinach, mundane but life-restoring. -- source link
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